This is what happened.

An event occurred on enterprise.lisco.com and it broke my MT installation and my DBM database.

Any entry that was rebuilt lost it’s comments. Other comments were lost at random. All of the content for Iowa Chicks Knitting was destroyed; I suspect a user rebuilt the database out of ignorance.

I tried to save I.C.K. by moving it. I’d already registered iowachicksknitting.com and it was ready to go with its own IP on the same server. I installed MT under iowachicksknitting.com and made a few entries and comments. It worked just fine.

I backed up what I could salvage from goblinbox.com.

MT-comments.cgi went absolutely nuts and was using 91.5% of the server’s CPU. I deleted mt-comments.cgi from the offending site: goblinbox.com.

The MT installation over at iowachicksknitting.com quit working, and hasn’t worked since even though I’ve reinstalled it from scratch.

I moved goblinbox.com to some space Keef hooked me up with. I installed MT and iB. Then I had Buzz and Keef finish up the DNS.

The loss of the temp IP I’d used to connect to the new server fucked up MT yet again, so I had to uninstall and reinstall MT for the fifth time in less than a week.

I got so pissed off I downloaded and installed WordPress, but although it’s pretty cute it will let you fatally murder it by changing a setting in the Options, so it’s hardly stable. I went back to massaging MT again.

And it’s working now. I imported what I’d managed to save from the old server. Today I’ve been deleting duplicate imports and adding categories to comments.

Rants 7 is up and running and stable, and even though I imported Rants 6 into it with no errors I don’t know where that data is.

I made some art today and massaged badly-imported data more. In the final analysis, I’ve installed MT six times total. I’ve upgraded, backed up, installed, and imported Ikonboard. I’ve backed up and imported MT entries. I’ve moved tons and tons and tons of files and images. And my site is still full of broken links and missing images, and iowachicksknitting.com is still totally non-functional.

Eventually, goblinbox will again be functional and beautiful, and iowachicksknitting.com will also be up and running. I’ve learned that I am that attached to my site, and I definitely need to be makin’ decent backups, and that if you don’t clean up your server Murphy will damn well do it for you.